Recession-proof yourself (and your team!)

Here at RescueTime we’ve always been focused on helping our users get the most out of their day. With the recent downturn of the world economy, it’s even more clear to us how important it is to help everyone be as cost-efficient with their time as possible. We’ve been reading about people having to pinch their pennies and are starting to encounter companies who want to do the same. We’d much rather see business teams be able to produce more with their existing members than have to cut headcount, so how can we at RescueTime help workers and businesses produce more in these troubled economic times?

RescueTime can help team members produce more in the same amount of time by helping them be more efficient. Just understanding where your time goes helps you make the most of it, and by introducing a certain amount of competitiveness to the rest of your team keeps you focused and engaged. Our service can also help top performers stand out – to make sure they get the credit they deserve.

RescueTime can help team managers more efficiently use their resources. Managers can justify their headcount by proving that all of their team members are engaged in their current projects. They can also immediately identify under-performers and bring them back on track, or even notice when team members are burning themselves out and need to take a break to bring them back to optimal performance.

With those things in mind, we wanted to make sure we were holding ourselves accountable to our own mission of actually rescuing our users’ time. At a time when people are cutting back, can we provide enough value to justify charging a subscription for our service? To answer this we took a look at our data and discovered that our users tend to see a 9% average increase in time spent on self-identified productive activities over the first eight weeks of using the application. This translates to a ROI of just about $90,000 per year in fully loaded costs for a 10 person team of employees making ~$50K per year. To put it another way, each person on your team only needs to save 20 seconds per day to recoup the cost of the service. You could even say that by using RescueTime, it’s almost like adding another person to your team.

In short – not only would we’d love it if RescueTime can help your business be more efficient and survive current and future market blips, but we also really want it to help people keep their jobs, or even get a raise! Imagine if you implemented RescueTime in your company and saw the gains we’re seeing our users achieve. We think we’re providing an incredible value with our service and hope you take the most advantage of it.

We created a little ROI calculator with Google Spreadsheets, where you can plug in the size and average salaries on your team to get a firmer ROI for your situation. Download the ROI calculator spreadsheet and see how much more cost-efficient your team can be.